Knol Another Post About Knol

Google, loved by many hated by few. I wonder if that’s about to change, big time?

I’ve been avoiding writing about Knol, Google’s wiki killer. Google have stolen the wiki idea and ran with it giving publishers a fancy new blog style interface that allows real HTML, the main kicker though is that they will revenue share with any advertising on your Knol articles. So what? That’s exactly what I said, I can publish my content on my own sites and get a revenue share from Google as well as using any other advertising I choose to use as well as building a long term “property” that I can be proud of for years to come. Or I can publish on Knol and get the same revenue share from Google. Why would I ever choose to publish my content on Knol?

Well I wouldn’t would I, but then again if you don’t have a website or a blog then I suppose it could be of use. Then again if you’re such an authority on a subject to write about it on Knol maybe you should have a website anyway? This was my initial stand point but that may have to change.

I figured there was no way that Google would bias in favour of its own Knol content in the natural search rankings, I was very wrong. SEO guru Aaron Wall has written an excellent article on his blog covering a very early experiment he ran with Knol. If at this very early stage, within days of going live, duplicate content posted onto Google Knol is ranking above the original authoritive source then anyone who publishers content via their own websites has a lot to worry about. There is nothing to stop somebody stealing your content, posting it to Knol and not only having your original out ranked but also the possibility of having it removed as duplicate content. That’s shit, wrong and really annoying for anybody who spends the time to write their own content.

I hope for all our sakes that this is just an early blip but somehow I doubt it. It’s very well known that Google did and do give YouTube pages a helping hand in their search results so I guess we’d all be a bit naive to think that they wouldn’t do the same with Knol. Isn’t it ironic that the same Google that actively ignores the rights of video producers via YouTube (to much support from the web community as a whole) is now about to ride rough shot over the rights of that same group of people.

ps From what I’ve seen so far, other than the medical articles every post contains a huge number of back links to an “original” source website. This whole Knol thing stinks of nothing but ripped off content + link spam to me

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POSTED BY Paul B on Jul 28 under Don't Make Money

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2 Comments so far

web hosting August 4, 2008 4:28 am

are the links dofollow?

web hosting’s last blog post..Google Sites Google Web Hosting
Paul B August 4, 2008 10:15 am

Nope, Knol’s pages are like a giant PR vacuum. Interesting as well, they Google don’t use the meta description tag either. Hmm.